“Absolutely,” Jenna said. “If someone else finds help because of my experience, I’ll be over the moon.”
“Thank you for your cooperation,” I said. “Why don’t you get us started, Jenna? Tell us your main reason for contacting me today. And remember the three Cs—”
“Confidence, candidness, and caution,” Jenna recited. She twisted her hands around each other, picking at her nails and adjusting her knuckles. “Where to begin… I guess at the beginning. Five years ago, I married the man of my dreams. He was perfect in every way. Tender, caring, passionate. I thought I was so lucky. Every woman in the world should envy me.” Jenna ducked her head, and her hair swung forward to obscure her face. “But after a few years, he changed. We began to fight. It was little things, like the way I loaded the dishwasher or too much spice in a dinner dish. I chalked it up to bad days at work or other frustrations. I made excuses for him. It got worse. He started hitting me and—” Jenna’s voice trembled and broke off. I waited patiently while she recollected herself. “Anyway, it was every once in a while, when he’d been drinking. Six months ago, I got pregnant. I thought it might be a fresh start. Babies are meant to be blessings. He accused me of sleeping with another man and beat me again. I lost the baby, and I was so enraged that I seriously considered killing my husband. But I didn’t have to. He drove his car off a bridge one night.”
“Jenna, I want to commend you for having the bravery to share your story,” I said as the woman plucked tissues from a nearby box and mopped her face. “If I recall, you contacted me because you thought your baby—did he or she have a name yet?”
“Anthony.”
“—because you thought Anthony might be having a hard time crossing over to the spirit realm,” I went on. “Can you explain to our viewers what you saw and felt before coming to this conclusion?”
Jenna squared her shoulders as if summoning the confidence of Madame Lucia. “Recently, when I’m alone in my apartment, I’ve been hearing things from the spare room. A crib rocking back and forth. A baby laughing, sometimes crying. But when I went into the room, the noises would stop. One day, I found a little rubber giraffe on the floor in there. It’s a popular teething toy, but I hadn’t bought anything for Anthony yet. It appeared out of nowhere.”
“Hmm.” I closed my eyes and swayed back and forth, my kimono sleeves undulating like twin waves beneath my arms. “Keep talking, Jenna. I sense a presence in the room. If it’s Anthony, he’ll take comfort in the sound of your voice and grow stronger.”
“Anthony?” Jenna squeaked. “Baby, is that you?”
Jazmin yanked on a piece of fishing wire, and a throw pillow on the armchair adjacent to the sofa hurled itself to the ground. Jenna gasped and covered her mouth.
“There is definitely a spirit here,” I murmured. “But is it truly Anthony?”
“Mommy loves you, Anthony,” Jenna said, gripping her computer close to her face so the viewers had a great shot of her bloodshot eyes. “You can go in peace now. I won’t be mad.”
Jazmin lazily tugged on another strand of wire. A row of decorative nesting dolls, lined up on the top of my bookshelf from tallest to shortest, committed suicide one by one.
“I don’t think it’s Anthony,” I whispered dramatically.
Jenna sniffled and wiped her nose. “Then who is it?”
Jazmin flipped on the projector, which cast a pearly outline on the wall behind me. She maneuvered the “ghost” from one side of the room to the other in a quick dash, shut off the projector, and then threw a baseball into frame. The ball careened into the teapot on the coffee table. The pot shattered, spraying water—not hot tea since we’d planned this gag ahead of time—all over me. I blotted my sopping face with the sleeve of the kimono.
“It’s your husband,” I revealed in a terrified whisper.
Viewers weren’t into sob stories. I’d learned that during my first year of broadcasting live. They didn’t want to sit around and watch someone else mope about their dead love or mother or kid or dog. They wanted hard and fast action. They wanted to be scared out of their seats. They wanted to feel the prickle of hair standing up on the back of their necks, and I was more than happy to provide it to them. After the big drama, I always gave the caller a happy ending. They deserved a peaceful conclusion to their hectic haunting experience. But first, I had to put them through some scary theatrics.
“I can feel his aura.” I picked up the bundle of sage from the coffee table, lit it with a match, and waved it around. Jazmin let another wisp of smoke out of the fog machine, upping the effect. “Be gone, impostor! Your hold over Jenna has finished. Your wedding vows were nullified with your death! Leave her in peace.”
Jazmin triggered another trick, opening the door of the china cabinet. We were approaching the big finale. A plate fell out and shattered on the floor. For once, I was glad my mother disapproved of my business ventures and never watched the show. She couldn’t yell at me for taking advantage of the family heirlooms if she didn’t know I was demolishing them for profit.
“Be gone!” I howled again, jumping on the sofa and brandishing the sage like a knight facing a fearsome dragon. “I banish you from the living realm!”
Jazmin put all of her weight behind the fishing wire. The cabinet tipped forward, slowly at first so all of the dishware spilled out in a cascade of smashed porcelain. I waited until the last second before diving out of the way, and the cabinet landed on the sofa with an ear-splitting crash right where I’d been standing. Glass rained down on me as I wiped fake sweat from my forehead. One sharp piece caught me above the eyebrow. Jazmin grimaced behind the camera.
“You cannot win,” I warned the fake spirit, letting the blood from the cut dribble down my cheek. Injuries made for excellent content. “You are no longer of this world.”
“Leave her alone!” Jenna begged through the monitor. “You monster!”
“Wait,” I said, pressing my palm to my chest. “I feel another presence. Is it…yes, I think so…it’s Anthony!”
Before Jazmin could pull off another trick, the door to the apartment burst open and the landlord of my building, Evan, stormed into frame. He was as tall as an NBA player with none of the grace. He walked like a monkey whose limbs were replaced with spaghetti, but his absurd height wasn’t enough to hide the shiny bald patch in the middle of his gray hair at the front of his forehead.
“What the blasted hell are you doing, Lucia?” he thundered. Broken glass crunched under his feet as he noticed Jazmin operating the camera. “Damn it, are you recording your ridiculous web show here again?”
“Uh, no?”
“You nearly decapitated Mrs. Lindon when you threw that old television out the window last month,” he scolded. “I had to waive her rent for three months to get her to drop the lawsuit. That was the last straw. I should’ve kicked you out then. Look what you’ve done to this apartment!”
“Madame Lucia?” Jenna said, peering into her webcam. “What’s going on? Are the ghosts still there?”
“Ghosts?” Evan planted himself in front of the camera. I signaled Jazmin to cut off the live broadcast, but she was too busy wrestling with Evan over the equipment. He wrenched the camera out of her hands and turned it on himself. “Listen up, idiots. If you think any of this is real, you’re wildly mistaken. Lucia Star is not a psychic or a medium or whatever dumb magician you think she is. She’s a swindler and a fraud, and you’re wasting your time and money if you call or watch—”
Jazmin slammed the laptop shut, cutting off the live feed at the same time I hung up on Jenna’s video conference. Evan relinquished the camera to Jazmin, satisfied with the damage done.
“Clean this up,” he said. “And then I want you out of here. Tonight.”
“You can’t kick me out. I signed a twelve-month lease!”
“Are you kidding?” He spread his arms and spun around. No matter which way he turned, he was met by a different disaster area of the apartment. “Look at this place! Your securi
ty deposit won’t begin to cover the repairs. You’ve violated your lease ten times over. You’re lucky I haven’t called the police.” He kicked one of the fallen nesting dolls and sent it spinning across the floor. “If you’re not gone by eight o’clock tonight, I will call them. Good riddance.”
He slammed the door behind him on his way out. I turned to Jazmin.
“How much of that do you think made it onto the live video?” I asked her.
“Not much, probably.”
“So pretty much everything?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
I flopped onto the sofa. Broken glass pinched my skin like prickly thorns. “Madame Lucia is dead.”
The video blew up. It was by far the most popular episode on Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed YouTube channel, but it ruined any chance of staging another false adventure into the spirit realm. The comments section was full of outraged spiritualists, amused naysayers, and vindicated I-told-you-soers. Without a home, I ended up at Jazmin’s place the next day, where I spent hours scrolling through the poorly worded, grammatically inferior debates of faceless Internet trolls, binge-watching Charmed on Netflix as I ate Jazmin out of house and home, and mourning the tragic, abrupt end of the only activity I could reasonably claim as a career. After two boxes of Lucky Charms, eight Pop Tarts, and a two-liter bottle of cherry soda, I threw up in fizzy technicolor and lay myself to rest on the floor of Jazmin’s bathroom, my face pressed against the cool teal tiles. When she got home from work, she dumped an armload of groceries in the kitchen to pick me off the ground.
“Oh no,” she said, hauling me up by the armpits. “You don’t get to do this, Lucia. You are an adult. Suck it up.”
“I’m a failure,” I moaned. “My mother was right about me. I can’t go through with anything. Not college. Not acting. Not Madame Lucia. Oh, God, I’m going to end up broke and alone for the rest of my life. I liked Madame Lucia! And now she’s gone. Dead. So much for clickbait.”
Jazmin ran a clean washcloth underneath warm water and began washing dried blood and crusty sugar off my face. The octagonal pattern of the tile floor was etched into my cheek like weird fish scales. “You do realize you’re grieving a fictional character, right? Christ, what is this, chocolate syrup? It’s not coming off.”
“She was more than that,” I said. “I felt different playing her. Stronger, you know?”
“Hey.” Jazmin squeezed my cheeks between her fingers. “Listen to me. Madame Lucia is the same person as Lucia Star. You have the same strengths. Once you stop doubting yourself and realize that, you’ll be unstoppable.”
I looped my arms around her neck. “Have I told you lately you’re my best friend?”
She hugged me back. “You smell like icing and barf.”
“I need real food. I ate my weight in processed sugar.”
“Take a shower,” Jazmin said, pulling a fresh towel from the linen closet for me. “I’ll make dinner. And put a bandage over that cut on your face, Rambo. I’ve got enough of your DNA on my things.”
The steamy shower cleared my mind and settled my stomach. By the time I emerged from the bathroom and saw the mess of junk food I’d left on Jazmin’s couch, I was sober enough to be embarrassed by my overreaction. As I cleaned up the Pop Tart wrappers, Jazmin loaded two cereal bowls with zucchini noodles and mushroom Bolognese and poured white wine for us both. She shoved aside my laptop—the screen of which displayed Evan’s dumb face as he exposed me to the entire world as a sham—to make room for the meal on the coffee table.
“You haven’t been watching that all day, have you?” she asked.
“No. I was switching between that and Charmed.”
Jazmin handed me one of the bowls. “This isn’t the end of the world, you know.”
“Isn’t it?” I said. “Jazmin, I’m almost thirty with no job, no home, and no prospects. At least Madame Lucia was fun to play and the advertising revenue paid my rent. What am I supposed to do now?”
“Create a new character,” she suggested. “You’re a talented actress, no matter how much you put yourself down. People watched your videos for you, not because of the gimmick. Let’s be honest, who believed that stuff was real anyway?”
“Plenty of people!”
“All I’m saying is you have options,” Jazmin went on, spinning zucchini noodles around her fork. “That video’s doing well for a reason—”
My phone rang in the middle of her sentence.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Unknown number.”
“It’s probably a solicitor.”
I answered the call anyway and pressed the speakerphone button. “Hello?”
It was a man’s voice, terse but polite. “Yes, hi, is this Madame Lucia?”
This was my private number, not the one I used for my online psychic business. I exchanged a glance with Jazmin, who shrugged.
“Yes, this is she,” I said. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“My name is Oliver Watson,” the man said. “And I think my daughter’s possessed.”
2
“Your daughter’s possessed?” I repeated. This was a new one. People called exorcists and clergymen for possessions, not the hokey spiritualist with the fake eyelashes and ridiculous accent. “What makes you think so?”
Jazmin nudged me and mouthed, “What are you doing?”
I waved her to be quiet. “Mr. Watson?”
“It’s Oliver, please,” he said. “And yes, I know it sounds insane. I feel absurd calling you, but I don’t know what to do. I wanted to take her to a doctor or a therapist, but she won’t let me. She’s hearing voices, saying my resort is haunted.”
“Do you believe her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “She’s a kid. She’s twelve. It’s either a cry for help or a plea for attention. Either way, it’s my responsibility to take care of it. Anyway, I snooped through her computer for hints, and I discovered she watches your web show.”
I smacked my palm against my forehead. Jazmin dragged my hand away and trapped it between hers. “Oliver,” I said. “Did you happen to see the latest episode of my web show?”
“No, my apologies, but I don’t make a habit of watching psychics on YouTube. Why?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Listen, I would love to help, but possessions aren’t my thing. Not to mention, I prefer for my callers to be eighteen years or older. I suppose with your consent, we can arrange a video conference for sometime next week. My sessions—”
“No, no,” Oliver interrupted. “I’m not looking for my daughter to be featured on your show. That’s not what I want.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Then why are you calling me?”
“I would like you to come to my resort to work with my daughter in person,” he replied. “She admires you. She’ll listen to you. I would like you to spend time with her as she goes about her day. Get to know her. If she really is hearing ghosts, then you’re the one person who will be able to help her. If she isn’t, and she suffers from schizophrenia or something similar, I imagine you should be able to inform me of that.”
“I’m not sure—”
“I can pay you generously,” he added. “I’m the owner of the King and Queens Ski Lodge and Resort in Crimson Basin. It’s a popular tourist destination. Not to be crude, but I have money. You can come here and stay at the resort for free. I’ll give you our best suite, a weekly allowance, ski passes, and whatever else you want.”
“I’m sure your resort is very nice,” I said, “but I don’t work with people in person. I’m a call-in spiritualist. That’s all.”
“Please.” The word dripped with desperation like sap from a tree. “I can’t think of anything else to do for her. If you come stay for a week or two and you help her in any way at all, I’ll give you ten thousand dollars afterward.”
My jaw unhinged. “Ten thousand dollars?”
“Yes, if you stay with her for at least a week.”
> Jazmin shook her head, mouthing the word “no” over and over again.
“Oliver, can I put you on hold for a second?” I asked. “I need to consult with my associate.”
“Of course.”
I hit the mute button on the phone and said to Jazmin, “Ten thousand dollars.”
“No,” she repeated out loud. “I’m sorry, Lucia, but this is way too sketchy. Some guy calls your private number out of the blue to request Madame Lucia come to his ski resort and meet his haunted daughter in person. If you go, you’re walking right into a con. He’s got something up his sleeve.”
“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe it’s true. Maybe his daughter really needs my help.”
“Need I remind you that you’re not a real psychic?” Jazmin pointed out. “What happens when you get there and you can’t do anything for the kid? Oliver’s going to figure out you’re not legitimate pretty quickly.”
“It’s not Oliver I have to convince,” I said. “It’s the daughter. How hard could it be? Kids are easy. They’ll believe anything. All I have to is babysit her for a week, and then I walk away with ten grand. That’s enough for a down payment on a new apartment.”
“It’s more than babysitting,” Jazmin said. “You don’t know anything about this kid. No parent describes their daughter as possessed unless she’s actually disturbed. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I reminded her. My finger hovered over the unmute button on the phone screen. “Now that I think about it, this might be the perfect way to revamp the web series after yesterday’s disastrous video. Can you imagine? A creepy kid and a haunted ski lodge? It’s something right out of The Shining.”
“And you’re Jack Torrance?”
“No, I’m Dick Hallorann.”
“He dies too.”
“Not in the book.”
“Does it really make a difference?” Jazmin said. “You haven’t actually got the shine. Seriously, Lucia. Think about this.”
The Haunting of Riley Watson Page 2